Technologies for Seductive Criticism is a collaboration between designer Gabriel Maher, cultural critic Jefferson Hack and Dazed Media, London. Working specifically with DazedDigital.com, three years’ worth of visual and text based content (from 2014 to 2017) was scraped from the online platform.

Technologies for Seductive Criticism is a methodology for new media cultural analysis developed alongside programmer Jayson Haebich. Focusing on representations of body and identity captured in image and text, Technologies for Seductive Criticism searches for editorial bias within cultural digital platforms. The background context of images is erased using an automated process of montage that leaves the digital-flesh of bodies exposed. Words are pulled from text in a process of quantification – from most used to least, verb, adjective and chronological use. The results of this deconstruction are sorted into subjective categories that observe posture, gesture, body relationships, proximity and scale; composing a visual analysis of bodies within new media and how they are positioned through language and situation.

Technologies for Seductive Criticism is constructed in a WebGL space as an interactive archive.

Discrimination and bias exists within coding structures. Especially when the machine must analyse or classify representations of the body; racial and gender biases as well as stereotyping. This is problematic on a cultural level as some algorithms will exclude, include, label and classify based on limiting criteria. This was a concern when we began to look at a technology to extract areas of digital flesh. We had to be sure that the algorithm did not discriminate based on tonal qualities

‘Regarding the skin extraction: the algorithm converts the image to a HSV [stands for hue, saturation, and value] colour space and allows for different tones/colours to be extracted via thresholding, this means that the algorithm can be used as a general purpose method for extracting different skin colours’. Programmer Jayson Haebich, 2016